CHARLIE LAMBERT says that sport was an important influence (Comet, 2011)

Considering that Norman either hated organised sport, or found that organised sport was not too keen on him, sport plays a surprisingly significant part in his work. Indeed, few writers have better captured the impact that a successful team can have on its community. Nicholson’s description of Millom in the mid 1920s when the town’s cricket team carried all before it demonstrates how the triumphs of a sports team can uplift an entire populace.This was a team that was so good that when the county selectors met to pick a team to represent Cumberland, they chose no fewer than five players from Millom Cricket Club. Cumberland were playing a team made up of the best players from the North Lancashire League, to which Millom belonged. The North Lancashire selectors picked four more from Millom, an astonishing tribute to the talent of that club.

It is surely these cricketers that Norman has in mind in the poem Millom Cricket Field, from the 1948 collection Rock Face. The poem is a warm evocation of summer and memories of summers gone by:Among the champion, legendary menI see my childhood roll like a cricket-ball.The 1920s were clearly a golden era – golden for cricket anyway, at a time of mass unemployment. Chapter Six of Wednesday Early Closing dwells lovingly on the status of the team. They brought the ring of the Sagas, once a week, into the life of what I was already beginning to realise was a small and not particularly distinguished town. Norman attached himself to this team with the fierce faith of the born-again Evangelical.

Frustratingly for me, as a journalist, Norman does not tell us exactly what Millom achieved in terms of sporting success. He does tell us that we did not often lose, and that in those days Millom had what now seems to be an heroic team, the like of which no-one will ever see again.

So I am indebted to Colin Bickerstaffe, honorary secretary of the North Lancashire and Cumbria Cricket League, for filling in the gaps. Colin informs me that, between 1920 and 1927, Millom won the league four times and were second three times. They didn’t then win the league again until 1956. When a knock-out cup competition was introduced in 1923, Millom won that too – and didn’t do so again until 1947. So for Norman, born in 1914, these players must indeed have been demi-gods. Many of them are mentioned reverentially by name in WEC. Herbert Thomas and Sid Mudge were teachers, Maurice Gill was the club’s professional, Alec Rigg was a one-time telegraph boy – names all confirmed by Colin. This team of heroes imparted a golden glow to the town, when the town had little else going for it. They gave a boy a glimpse of glory, recalls Norman. They helped a whole community to hold its head up.

Supporters of, for example, Liverpool Football Club would recognise this. When the city of Liverpoolwent through tough economic and social times in the 1970s and 1980s, the achievements of the city’s football teams (I include Everton) had exactly the same effect. Nicholson would probably prefer a different analogy. For him, football was rugby league, not the association code, and the triumphant progress of Wigan RLFC in the 1980s and 1990s would have been a more appropriate parallel.

Wigan, of course, occupies a highly symbolic place in Nicholson’s writing.

“He gev it Wigan!” was the admiring verdict of those present when the local baritone – eschewing style for force – made his emphatic contribution to the music festival (At the Music Festival, Sea to the West). Why Wigan? Because while it was

Barrow for ships. Whitehaven for coal,Millom, of course, for men

it was

Wigan for a damned good try.The pun on try being fairly obvious. The effort and achievement of the rugby men of Wigan strike Norman as an honourable example when it comes to the living of life.

God grant me guts to dieGiving it Wigan.There was a family tradition in sport. Norman’s father was secretary and instructor at the Gymnastic Class, and sufficiently keen on football (the Association variety) to risk arranging his honeymoon to London because he wanted to see Preston North End play in the FA Cup Final (WEC, Chapter Four). He was proud of his Uncle Jack, a successful local cricketer and footballer (football as in rugby this time) who was killed in a mining accident before Norman was born. But in Chapter Six of WEC he describes his own time on the school playing field as the most miserable hours of my schooldays, and in Chapter Eight gives blood-curdling details of the indignities suffered when forced to play rugby against his will.

If any headmaster wants to induce a lifelong indifference to, or intolerance of, almost all sports and athletics, then compulsory games is the best way of going about it. (WEC, Chapter Eight). But actually, it wasn’t quite as bad as that. Sport served Norman well. As a young boy it helped him define the world beyond Millom.London was Wembley…Manchester was the Test. (At the Music Festival). Even the extent of February snow, noted in Provincial Pleasures, was set in cricketing terms: At Old Trafford it was wicket-high. Sport provided him with a series of waymarkers to chart the rotation of the seasons and the passage of time, concepts which were always important. In Provincial Pleasures, Nicholson’s month by month journey through the year, the end of April is signalled by the transition from the rugby season to cricket. Cricket then dominates the June chapter, with an account of the annual grudge match between neighbouring teams Odborough and Oatrigg. This duel is described in immense detail, though not the kind that Wisden might allow:

The fourth side of the ground opens on to the meadows. This is where the strangers sit, because it is the prettiest side, and they do not know that they will get an ache in the back and a draught in the neck.Nicholson glories as much in the shortcomings of the players as their prowess. The crowd’s favourites, he writes, are the unpredictables…the men who always chuck the ball to the wrong end when then there is a chance of a run-out.He would identify with that. Cricket was one game he loved to play, despite a chronic lack of ability. In company with his pal Albert, on their own, all manner of unlikely one-a-side matches would be played in a rough corner of the Field, where the rushes stuck up out of the grass like the bristles from a worn-out hairbrush….If we managed to keep half the deliveries within two yards of the wicket on either side, we judged that we were in good form (WEC, Chapter Six).Later in his school career, he took up tennis and to everyone’s surprise became not bad at the game. Not good, of course; but even to be not bad was a new experience for me (WEC Chapter Nine).Sport, and particularly cricket, provides the poet with a useful kitbag of metaphors. His musings on The New Cemetery (Sea to the West) are set at the cricket field, looking ahead to one end-of-season day, or end-of-life day. The same concept underpins the 1987 poem How’s That? published in the year of his death. The cricketing conceit is carried through the entire poem as the typical crises of life prompt a series of appeals by a bowler - “how’s that?” - only for the umpire to repeatedly give another chance by pronouncing “not out.” Until the final stanza when Four score years and ten,With a gurgle in the bronchials, a growling in the breathAppealing for a re-play, life over once again -Out,Says Death.Horrible irony, then, that it was at a cricket match where the disease which defined Norman’s life first made its appearance. On holiday in Scarborough he and his father went to watch Yorkshire.Then, at close of play, when everybody stood up to leave, I staggered as if I were drunk. For a moment, the field swam round me, and, as if a turban were pushed down over my eyes, first the sky and then the field turned black (WEC Chapter Nine).This was the first indication of tuberculosis. But he bears cricket no grudge. Other sports push their way in, among them, inevitably, Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling which is employed brilliantly to describe a dry-stone wall (Wall, Sea to the West). But it is cricket which was the sporting love of his life and cricket which repeatedly finds its way into his writing.

Millom Cricket Club, like Halley’s comet, did eventually re-lay its bright trail across the black sky. Colin Bickerstaffe, whose grandson is now captain of the club, reports that Millom were league champions for six years running from 1989 to 1994. Truly another golden age, and it started two years after Norman had finally been given “out” on his end-of-season day. The umpires might just have had some assistance in making the right decisions.

(Charlie Lambert is a freelance journalist and heads the Sports Journalism course at the University of Central Lancashire.)